Austrian Political Networks on Twitter

The next session at AoIR 2012 begins with a paper presented by Julian Ausserhofer and Axel Maireder about national politics on Twitter, in the case of Austria. Twitter is now being used by a range of political actors in the country, including journalists and politicians, who are at times publicly interacting with one another using the platform. Many users also link to news media materials, of course.

Twitter communication is public by default; there is a low threshold to communication and Twitter is very open to participation. At the same time, the question is whether this leads to a greater public involvement in political discussion, or provides just another space for the usual suspects. So who tweets about politics in Austria, and how?

Twitter use in Austria is led by journalists, politicians, and social media personalities – not by celebrities. This is unusual by international comparison. There are some 86,000 Austrian Twitter accounts, of which more then 40,000 are inactive at this point. The current project takes a user-centric approach to the study of Twitter: it follows users rather than focussing on hashtags.

Users were identified through their use of relevant person names, party names, and other terms relevant to Austrian politics; this resulted in some 2,000 users who were further filtered by their level of activity, leaving 374 users (politicians, journalists, activists, and others). Of the politicians, the Greens party and the Social Democrats were the leading users – although conservative parties are dominant in Austrian politics at the moment.

Tweets to and from these users were gathered over four sample weeks, and their contents and network interactions were studied. More than two thirds of tweets @mentioned another user; most retweets occurred during the afternoon, while there was more @replying at night. There is a spike at 22:00 every night, and TV anchor Armin Wolf is most central to the overall network of interactions.

The resulting network is split into professional, early adopter citizen, activist, and social media marketer areas; politicians and journalists interact heavily, most of the groups also interact strongly with users outside of the core group of 374 users. This means that the core network is quite open to participation from less active users. The network has a number of hubs – many of them regular citizens. The network is strongly dominated by male users; only two major female journalists are visible in the network.

The team also examined the newspaper articles shared on Twitter – including education issues, the Occupy movement, and corruption problems; the global financial crisis is rarely addressed. In the context of specific themes and issues, Twitter can be used as a backchannel to discuss these issues.

This user-centric approach provides a useful counterpoint to hashtag-focussed research. It reveals a dense political network, in which citizens are also highly involved; there is substantial interaction with less active users as well. The network is an arena for established actors as well as for participation by more casual users.